
:^-& 






REPORT 



SUBJECT OF SLAYERY, ''^ 



PRESENTED TO THE 



SYNOD OF SOUTH CAROLINA, 



SESSIONS IN WINNSBOROUGH, NOVEMBER 6, 1851 

.^OPTED BY THEM, AND PUBLISHED BY THEIR ORDER. 

BY REV. J. H. THORNWELL, D. D. 



COLUMBIA, S. C. 
STEAM-POWER PRESS OF A. S. JOHNSTON. 

1852. 



? f'^- 






REPORT 01 SLAYERT. 



It will be remembered that at the Sessions of this Synod in Colum- 
bia, in 1847, a series of resolutions was presented, setting forth the 
relations of the Church to slavery, and the duties respectively of 
masters and servants. After some discussion, it was deemed advis- 
able to appoint a committee to take the whole subject into consider- 
ation, and submit a report, somewhat in the form of a circular letter 
to all the Churches of Jesus Christ throughout the earth, explaining 
the position of Southern Christians, and vindicating their right to 
the confidence, love and fellowship of all who everywhere call 
upon the name of our common Master. The design of appointing 
this committee was not to increase, but to allay agitation. It was 
evident that a strong public sentiment, both in Europe and America, 
had been organized, and was daily growing in intensity, against 
institutions which we had inherited from our fathers, and against 
which we felt no call, either from religion or policy, to enter a pro- 
test. We felt it to be due to Christian charity to make an effort, 
however unsuccessfully, to disabuse the minds of brethren, with 
whom we were anxious to maintain the unity of the spirit in the 
bonds of peace, of prejudices and misapprehensions which we were 
confident had misled them. Events have taken place since the 
appointment of the committee, which invest the subject with addi- 
tional importance. At that time the greatest danger immediately 
apprehended was a partial alienation, perhaps an external schism, 
among those who were as one in a common faith. But now, more 
portentous calamities are dreaded. The determined zeal, with 
which a policy founded, for the most part, in the conviction that 
slavery is a sin, is pressed upon the Federal Legislature, justifies 
the gloomiest forebodings in relation to the integrity of the Union 
and the stability of our free institutions. The question has passed 
from the Church to the State ; it is no longer a debate among 
Christian ministers and Christian men, as to the terms of commu- 
nion and the rights of particular communities to the Christian name. 



4 REPORT ON SLAVERY. 

It is now a question as to the equality of the States which compose 
this great commonwealth of nations, and the obligation of the char- 
ter which binds them in federal alliance. The immense importance 
which, in this aspect, is given to the subject, has induced the chair- 
man of your committee to present, upon his own responsibility, the 
following thoughts. He has been unable to consult the brethren 
who were appointed with him. And as he is deeply convinced that 
the position of the Southern, and perhaps, he may say, of the whole 
Presbyterian Church, in relation to slavery, is the only position 
which can save the country from disaster and the Church from 
schism, he is quickened by the double consideration of patriotism 
and religion to record opinions which, however hastily expressed, 
have been maturely weighed. 

•• I. The relation of the Church to slavery cannot be definitely set- 
tled without an adequate apprehension of the nature and office of 
the Church itself. What, then, is the Church ? It is not, as we 

I fear too many are disposed to regard it, a moral institute of univer- 
sal good, whose business it is to wage war upon every form of 
human ill, whether social, civil, political or moral, and to patronize 
every expedient which a romantic benevolence may suggest as 
Ukely to contribute to human comfort, or to mitigate the inconven- 
iences of life. We freely grant, and sincerely rejoice in the truth, 
that the healthful operations of the Church, in its own appropriate 
sphere, re-act upon ail the interests of man, and contribute to the 
progress and prosperity of society ; but we are far from admittmg 
either that it is the purpose of God, that, under the present dispen- 
sation of religion, all ill shall be banished from this sublunary state, 
and earth be converted into a paradise, or that the proper end of 
the Church is the direct promotion of universal good. It has no 
commission to construct society afresh, to adjust its elements in 
different proportions, to re arrange the distribution of its classes, 
or to change the forms of its political constitutions. The noble 
schemes of philanthropy which have distinguished Christian na- 
tions ; their magnificent foundations for the poor, the maimed and 
the blind ; the efforts of the wise and good to mitigate human mis- 
ery, and to temper justice with mercy in the penal visitations of the 
law • the various associations that have been formed to check and 
abate particular forms of evil, have all been quickened into life by 
the spirit of Christianity. But still it is not the distinctive province 
of the Church to build Asylums for the needy or insane ; to organize 



REPORT ON SLAVERY. 5 

societies for the improvement of the penal code, or for arresting 
the progress of intemperance, gambling or lust. The problems 
which the anomalies of our fallen state are continually forcing on 
philanthropy, the Church has no right directly to solve. She must 
leave them to the Providence of God and to human wisdom, sanc- 
tified and guided by the spiritual influences which it is her glory to 
foster and cherish. The Church is a very peculiar society — volun- 
tary in the sense that all its members become so, not by constraint, 
but willingly ; but not in the sense that its doctrines, discipline and 
order, are the creatures of human will, deriving their authority and 
obligation from the consent of its members. On the contrary, it 
has a fixed and unalterable constitution ; and that constitution is 
the word of God. It is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. He 
is enthroned in it as a sovereign. It can hear no voice but His ; 
obey no commands but His ; pursue no ends but His. Its officers 
are His servants, bound to execute only His will. Its doctrines are 
His teachings, which He, as a prophet, has given from God ; its 
discipline His law, which He as king has ordained. The power of 
the Church, accordingly, is only ministerial and declarative. The 
Bible, and the Bible alone, is her rule of faith and practice. She ' 
can announce what it teaches ; enjoin what it commands ; prohibit 
what it condemns, and enforce her testimonies by spiritual sanctions. 
Beyond the Bible she can never go, and apart from the Bible she 
can never speak. To the law and to the testimony, and to them 
alone, she must always appeal ; and when they are silent it her 
duty to put her hand upon her lips. 

These principles, thus abstractly stated, are not likely to provoke 
opposition, but the conclusion which flows from them, and for the 
sake of which we have here stated them, has unfortunately been too 
much disregarded ; and that is, that the Church is not at liberty to 
speculate. She has a creed, but no opinions. When she speaks, 
it must be in the name of the Lord, and her only argument is, thus 
it is written. 

In conformity with this principle, has the Church any authority 
to declare slavery to be sinful] Or, in other words, has the Bible, 
anywhere, either directly or indirectly, condemned the relation of 
master and servant, as incompatible with the will of God ? 

We think there can be little doubt, that if ihe Church had uni- 
versally repressed the spirit of speculation, and had been content to 
stand by the naked testimony of God, we should have been spared 



6 REPORT ON SLAVERY. 

many of the most effective dissertations against slavery. Deduct 
the opposition to it which has arisen from sympathy witli imaginary 
sufferings, from ignorance of its nature and misappHcation of the 
crotchets of philosophers — deduct the opposition which is due to 
sentiment, romance or speculation, and how much will be found to 
have originated from the humble and devout study of the Scriptures? 
Will any man say that he who applies to them with an honest and 
imprejudiced mind, and discusses their teachings upon the subject, 
simply as a question of language and interpretation, will rise from 
the pages with the sentiments or spirit of a modern abolitionist ? 
Certain it is that no direct condemnation of it can anywhere be 
found in the sacred volume. A social element in all states, from 
the dawn of history until the present period, if it be the crying and 
damning sin which its enemies represent it to be, it is truly amazing 
that the Bible, which professes to be a lamp to our feet and a light 
to our path, to make the man of God perfect, thoroughly furnished 
unto every good work, no where gives the slightest caution against 
this tremendous evil. The master is no where rebuked as a mon- 
ster of cruelty and tyranny — the slave no where exhibited as the 
object of peculiar compassion and sympathy. The manner in 
which the relation itself is spoken of and its duties prescribed, the 
whole tone and air of the sacred writers convey the impression that 
they themselves had not the least suspicion that they were dealing 
with a subject full of abominations and outrages. We read their 
language — cool, dispassioned, didactic. We find masters exhorted 
in the same connection with husbands, parents, magistrates ; slaves 
exhorted in the same connection with wives, children and subjects. 
The Prophet or Apostle gives no note of alarm — raises no signal of 
distress when he comes to the slave and his master, and the un- 
wary reader is in serious danger of concluding that according to the 
Bible, it is not much more harm to be a master than a father — a 
slave than a child. But this is not all. The Scriptures not only 
fail to condemn — they as distinctly sanction slavery as any other 
social condition of man. The Church was organized in the family 
of a slaveholder ; it was divinely regulated among the chosen peo- 
ple of God, and the peculiar duties of the parties are inculcated 
under the Christian economy. These are facts which cannot be 
denied. Our argument then is this: If the Church is bound to 
abide by the authority of the Bible, and that alone, she discharges ' 
her whole office in regard to slavery, when she declares what the 



REPORT ON SLAVERY. 7 

Bible teaches, and enforces its laws by her own peculiar sanctions. 
Where the Scriptures are silent, she must be silent too. What the 
Scriptures have not made essential to a Christian profession, she 
does not undertake to make so. What the Scriptures have sanc- 
tioned, she does not condemn. To this course she is shut up by 
the nature of her constitution. If she had universally complied 
with the provisions of her charter, the angry discussions which 
have disgraced her courts and produced bitterness and alienation 
among her own children, in different countries, and in different sec- 
tions of the same land, would all have been prevented. The abo- 
lition excitement derives most of its fury, and all its power, from the 
conviction which Christian people, without warrant from God, have 
industriously propagated, that slavery, essentially considered, is a 
sin. They have armed the instincts of our moral nature against 
it. They have given the dignity of principle to the clamours of 
fanaticism ; and the consequence is that many Churthes are dis- 
tracted and the country reeling under a series of assaults in which 
treachery to man is justified as obedience to God. According to the 
rule of faith which gives to the Church its being, the relation of 
master and slave stands on the same foot with the other relations 
of life. In itself considered, it is not inconsistent with the will of 
God — it is not sinful. This is as much a doctrine of Christianity 
as the obligation of obedience to law. The Church, therefore, can- 
not undertake to disturb the relation. The Bible further teaches 
that there are duties growing out of this relation — duties of the mas- 
ter and duties of the slave. The Church must enforce these duties 
upon her own members. Here her jurisdiction stops. As a Church 
— as the visible Kingdom of our Lord q.nd Saviour Jesus Christ — 
she must venture to interfere no further, unless it be to repress the 
agitation of those who assume to be wiser and purer than the word 
of God. Those who corrupt the Scriptures, who profanely add to 
the duties of the Decalogue, are no more entitled to exemption from 
ecclesiastical discipline than any other disturbers of the peace or 
fomenters of faction and discord. It is not a question whether 
masters can be received into the communion of the saints, but it is 
a question whether those who exclude them should not themselves 
be rejected. We are far from insinuating that abolitionists, as such^ 
are unfit to be members of the Church. Slavery may evidently be 
contemplated in various aspects — as a social arrangement, involv 
ng a distinction of classes, like oriental caste, or European grada- 



8 REPORT ON SLAVERY. 

tion of ranks — as a civil relation, involving rights, obligations cor- 
responding to its own nature — as a political condition, bearing upon 
the prosperity, happiness and growth of communities. In any or 
in all these aspects, it may be opposed upon considerations of policy 
and prudence, as the despotism of Asia, the aristocracy of Europe, 
or the free institutions of America are opposed, without the imputa- 
tion of sin upon the nature of the relation itself. The members of 
the Church, as citizens and as men, have the same right to judge of 
the expediency or inexpediency of introducing and perpetuating in 
their own soil this institution, as any other element of their social 
economy. But they transcend their sphere, and bring reproach 
upon the Scriptures as a rule of faith, when they go beyond these 
political considerations, and condemn slavery as essentially repug- 
nant to the will of God. They then corrupt the Scriptures, and 
are exposed to the malediction of those who trifle with the Divine 
Testimony. *The Southern Churches have never asked their bre- 
thren in Europe, or in the non-slaveholding sections of their own 
land, to introduce slavery among them — they have never asked 
them to approve it as the wisest and best constitution of society. 
All they have demanded is, that their brethren would leave it 
where God has left it, and deal with it, where it is found, as God 
has dealt with it. We insist upon it that they should not disturb 
the tranquility of the State by attempting to re-adjust our social 
fabrick according to their own crotchets, when we ourselves, the 
only parties who have a right to meddle, are satisfied with our con- 
dition. We do not recognize them as political apostles, to whom 
God has transferred from us the right inherent in every other people, 
to manage their affairs in .their own way, so long as they keep 
within the limits of the Divine Law. If we fail in our social and 
political organizations — if, by consequence, we lag behind in the pro- 
gress of nations, we do not forfeit our right to self-government and 
become the minors and wards of wiser and stronger States. It is 
as preposterous in our Northern and European brethren to under- 
take to force their system upon us, or to break up our own in obe- 
dience to their notions, as it would be in us to wage a war upon 
theirs, on the ground that ours is better. Slavery, as a political 
question, is one in regard to which communities and States may 
honestly differ. But as a moral question, the Bible has settled it ; 
and all we contend for is, that being a matter of liberty, we should 
not break fellowship for difference upon other grounds. If any man. 



' \, 



REPORT ON SLAVERY. 9 

however, is not content to stand by the word of God — if any Church 
will not tolerate the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free — 
that man and that Church cannot be vindicated from the charge of 
fomenting schism. They become justly exposed to censure. He 
who would debar a slaveholder from the table of the Lord, upon the 
simple and naked ground that he is a slaveholder, deserves himself 
to be excluded for usurping the prerogatives of Christ and intro- 
ducing terms of communion which cast reproach upon the conduct 
of Jesus and the Apostles. He violates the very charter of the 
Church — is a traitor to its fundamental law. 

We have been struck with three circumstances in the conduct of 
what may be called the Christian argument against slavery. The 
first is, that the principles from which, for the most part, the con- 
clusion has been drawn, were the abstrusest of all speculations upon 
the vexed question of human rights, and not the obvious teachings 
of the Scriptures. The second is, that when the argument has been 
professedly taken from the Bible, it has consisted in strained appli- 
cations of passages, or forced inferences from doctrines, in open vio- 
lation of the law that Scripture is its own interpreter ; and the third 
is, that duties which the Bible enjoins are not only inadequately 
recognized, but forced into a system of morals whose fundamental 
principles exclude them. 

The argument from philosophy, if the dogmas of sophists upon the 
nature and extent of human rights can be dignified with the title of 
philosophy, a Church Court cannot admit to be authoritative, with- 
out doing violence to her own constitution. It is not denied that 
truth is truth, whether found in the Bible or out of it, and it is not 
denied that there is much truth, and truth of a most important kind, 
which it is not the province of revelation to teach. But then it 
should be remembered that this is truth with which the Church, as 
such, has nothing to do. Neither should it be forgotten, that if 
human speculation conducts to a moral result directly contradictory 
of the Scriptures, faith convicts it of falsehood, the word of God 
being a surer guide than the wit of man. When the question is 
whether man is mistaken or the word of God deceitful, the answer 
to the Church cannot be doubtful. And yet how much of the de- 
clamation against slavery, in which Christian people are prone to 
indulge, is founded upon principles utterly unsupported by the Scrip- 
tures? One man very complacently tells lis that every man is en- 
titled to the fruit of his own labour ; and that the master, in appro- 



10 REPORT ON SLAVERY. 

priating that of the slave, defrauds him of his right. It is then 
denounced as a system of robbery and phmder, which every good 
man should labour to banish from the earth. But where is the 
maxim, in the sense in which it is interpreted, to be found in the 
Scriptures? Where, even in any respectable system of moral philo- 
sophy? Where are we taught that the labour which a man puts 
forth in his own person is always his, or belongs to him of right, 
and cannot belong to another? How does it appear that what is 
ph^^sically his, must be legally his ? Another insists on the absolute 
equality of the species, and can find no arrangement in harmony 
with reason, but that which shall reduce the race to a stagnant 
uniformity of condition. But where do the Scriptures teach that 
an essential equality as men implies a corresponding equality of 
state ? And who is authorized to limit the application of this sweep- 
ing principle to the sole relation of slavery ? It is as much the 
weapon of the socialist and leveller as of the abolitionist, and the 
Church cannot accept it without renouncing the supremacy of the 
Scriptures ; neither can she proceed, upon it, to excommunicate the 
slaveholder, without fulminating her anathemas against the rich 
and the noble. Another insists upon the essential and indestruc- 
tible personality of men, and vituperates slavery as reducing human 
beings to the condition of chattels and of things, as if it were possi- 
ble that human legislation could convert matter into mind or mind 
into matter, or as if slavery were not professedly a relation of man 
to man. The arguments from this and all similar grounds can be 
easily answered. It will be found, in every case, either that the 
principle assumed is false in itself or distorted in its application, or 
that the whole discussion proceeds on a gratuitous hypothesis in 
regard to the nature of slavery. But whether they can be answered 
or not, no deductions of man can set aside the authority of God. 
The Bible is supreme, and as long as it allows the institution, the 
Church should not dare to rebuke it. In a court of Jesus Christ 
we would not think of presenting any consideration as conclusive, 
but thus saith the Lord. 

But when the argument is professedly conducted from the Bible, 
it is in violation of the great principle that Scripture is its own in- 
terpreter. It is notorious — it is indeed universally conceded, that 
no express condemnations of slavery have ever been produced from 
the sacred volume. The plan is, in the absence of any thing pre- 
cise and definite, to demonstrate an incongruity betwixt the analogy 



REPORT ON SLAVERY. 11 

and general spirit of the Bible, and the facts of slavery. Some gen- 
eral principle is siezed upon, such as the maxim of universal bene- 
volence, or of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, 
and brouglit into contrast with the degradation or abuses of bond- 
age. Or specific precepts, such as this in relation to the family, are 
singled out, with which it is supposed slavery renders it impossible 
to comply. The fallacy in these cases is easily detected. The 
same line of argument, carried out precisely in the same way, 
would make havoc with all the institutions of civilized society. In- 
deed, it would be harder to defend from the Scriptures the righteous- 
ness of great possessions than the righteousness of slavery. The 
same principle which would make the master emancipate his ser- 
vant, on the ground of benevolence, would make the rich man 
share his estates with his poor neighbours ; and he who would 
condemn the institution as essentially and inherently evil, because 
it sometimes incidentally involves the disruption of family ties, 
would condemn the whole texture of society in the non-slavehold- 
ing States, where the separation of parents and children, of hus- 
bands and wives, is often a matter of stern necessity. But however 
the argument might be answered, it is enough for a Christian man, 
who compares Scripture with Scripture, to know that slavery is 
expressly excepted from the application of this or any other prin- 
ciple in the sweeping sense of the abolitionists. It is not a case 
)eft to the determination of general principles — it is provided for in 
the law. If the Scriptures were silent in regard to it, we might 
appeal to analogies to aid us in reaching the will of God ; but as 
they have mentioned the subject again and again, and stated the 
principles which are to be applied to it, we are shut up to these 
special testimonies. 

Those who have been conversant with works against slavery, 
cannot have failed to be struck with the awkward and incongruous 
appearance which in these works the commands of the Scriptures to 
masters and servants assume. They lay down principles which 
make slavery an utter abomination — treason to man and rebellion 
against God. They represent it as an enormous system of cruelty, 
tyranny and impiety. They make it a fundamental duty to labour 
for its extirpation, and yet will not venture directly and boldly, at 
least Christian a bolitionists, to counsel insurrection or murder ; they 
will even repeat the conmiands of the Bible, as if in mockery of all 
their speculations. Now we ask if these commands are not forced 



12 REPORT ON SLl\rERY. 

appendages to their moral system ? Are they not awkwardly in- 
serted? The moral system of abolitionists does not legitimately 
admit them ; and if they were not restrained by respect for the Bible 
from carrying out their own doctrines, they would find themselves 
forced to recommend measures to the slave very different from obe- 
dience to his master. Those, accordingly, who prefer consistency 
to piety, have not scrupled to reject these precepts, and to denounce 
the book which enjoins them. They feel the incongruity betwixt 
their doctrines and these duties, and they do not hesitate to revile 
the Scriptures as the patron of tyranny and bondage. Admit the 
principle that slavery, essentially considered, is not a sin, and the 
injunctions of Scripture are plain, consistent, intelligible ; deny the 
principle, and the Bible seems to be made up of riddles. 

Such is a general view of the christian argument against slavery. 
We are not conscious of having done it any injustice. We have 
endeavored to study it impartially and candidly ; but we confess 
that the conviction grows upon us, that those who most violently 
denounce this relation, have formed their opinions in the first in- 
stance independently of the Bible, and then by special pleading 
have endeavoured to pervert its teachings to the patronage of their 
assumptions. They strike us much more as apologists for the de- 
fects and omissions of the Scriptures, than as humble inquirers, 
sitting at the feet of Jesus to learn His will. They have settled 
it in their own minds that slavery is a sin ; then the Bible must 
condemn it, and they set to work to make out the case that the Bible 
has covertly and indirectly done what they feel it ought to have 
done. Hence those peculiar features of the argument to which we 
have already adverted. 

To this may be added a total misapprehension of the nature of 
the institution. Adjuncts and concomitants of slavery are con- 
founded with its essence, and abuses are seized upon as character- 
istic of the very genius of the institution. 

If this method of argument is to be persisted in, the consequences 
must ultimately be injurious to the authority of the sacred writers. 
Those who have not a point to gain, will easily detect the sophistry 
which makes the Scriptures subsidiary to abolitionism ; and if they 
are to receive it as a fundamental principle of morals that there can 
be no right to the labour of another, independently of contract, and 
this is the essence of slavery, they will be shut up to the necessity 
of denying the sufficiency and plenary inspiration of the Scriptures. 



REPORT ON SLAVERY. 13 

Like More.ll, they will take then stand upon the defective morality of 
the Bible, and scout the idea of any external, authoritative rule of 
faith. The very same spirit of rationalism which has made the 
Prophets and Apostles succumb to philosophy and impulse in rela- 
tion to the doctrines of salvation, lies at the foundation of modern 
speculation in relation to the rights of man. Opposition to slavery 
has never been the offspring of the Bible. It has sprung from vision- 
ary theories of human nature and society — it has sprung from the 
misguided reason of man — it comes as natural, not as revealed 
truth ; and when it is seen that the word of Gcd stands in the way 
of it, the lively oracles will be stripped of their authority, and 
reduced to the level of mere human utterances. We affectionately 
warn our brethren of the mischiefs that must follow from their 
mode of conducting the argument against us — they are not only 
striking at slavery, but they are striking at the foundation of our 
common faith. They are helping the cause of rationalism. We 
need not repeat that a sound philosophy must ever coincide with 
revelation, but what we insist upon is that in cases of conflict, the 
Scriptures must be supreme. Man may err, but God can never lie. 
If men are at liberty from their own heads to frame systems of 
morality, which render null and void the commandments of God, 
we see not why they are not equally at liberty to frame systems of 
doctrines which render vain the covenant of grace. If they are 
absolutely their own law, why not absolutely their own teachers'? 
It is, therefore, a very grave question which they have to decide, 
who, in opposition to the example of the Apostles of our Lord, ex- 
clude masters from the communion of the saints, and from the 
hopes of the Gospel. 

The history of the world is full of illustrations that the foolish- 
ness of God is wiser than man. There is a noble moderation in 
the Scriptures, upon which alone depends the stability of States 
and the prosperity and success of the whole social economy. It 
rebukes alike the indifference and torpor which would repress the 
spirit of improvement and stiffen society into a fixed and lifeless 
condition, and the spirit of impatience and innovation which des- 
pises the lessons of experience and rushes into visionary schemes of 
reformation. It is in the healthful operation of all the limbs and 
members of the body politic that true progress consists ; and he 
who fancies that deformities can be cured by violent and hasty am- 
putations, may find that in removing what seemed to be only ex- 



14 REPORT ON SLAVERY. 

crescences, he is inflicting a fatal stroke upon vital organs of the 
system. Slavery, to those who are unaccustomed toils operations, 
may seem to be an unnatural and monstrous condition, but it will 
be found that no principles can be pleaded to justify its removal 
which may not be applied with fatal success to the dearest inter- 
ests of man. They who join in the unhallowed crusade against the 
institutions of the South, will have reason to repent that they have 
set an engine in motion which cannot be arrested until it has crush- 
ed and ground to powder the safeguards of life and property among 
themselves. 

Deeply convinced as we are thai the proper position of the Church 
relation to slavery is that which we have endeavoured to present 
in these pages, we would earnestly and solemnly expostulate with 
those denominations at the North who have united in the outcry 
against us, and urge them to reconsider their steps in the fear of 
God and under the guidance of His word. We ask them to take 
the Apostles as their guide. We are solemn and earnest, not only 
because we deplore a schism in the body of Christ, but because we 
deplore a schism among the confederated States of this Union. We 
know what we say when we declare our deliberate conviction that 
the continued agitation of slavery must sooner or later shiver this 
government into atoms ; and agitated it must continue to be, unless 
the Churches of Jesus Christ take their stand firmly and immove- 
ably upon the platform of the Bible. The people of the South ask 
nothing more — they will be content with nothing less. Let the 
Churches take this position, and the people of the North will find 
their moral instincts rallying to the support of our Federal Consti- 
tution, and will give to the winds a policy founded on the profane 
insinuation that slaveiy is essentially a sin. Free-soilism is nothing 
but the application to politics of this unscriptural dogma. If slavery 
be indeed consistent with the Bible, their responsibility is tremen- 
dous^ who, in obedience to blind impulses and visionary theories, 
pull down the fairest fabric of government the world has ever seen, 
rend the body of Christ in sunder, and dethrone the Saviour in His 
own Kingdom. What a position for Churches of Josus Christ — 
aiding and abetting on the one hand the restless and turbulent 
designs of agitators, demagogues and radical reformers, and giving 
countenance on the other to a principle which, if legitimately car- 
ried out, robs the Scriptures of their supremacy, and delivers us over 
to the folly and madness of rationalism. Are our country, our 



REPORT ON SLAVERY. 15 

Bible, our interests on earth and our hopes for heaven, to be sacri- 
ficed on the altars of a fierce fanaticism ? Are laws to be made 
which God never enacted — doctrines to be taught which the Apos- 
tles have condemned, and are they to be propagated and forced on 
men at the peril of every thing that is dear and precious? We 
conjure our brethren — for such we shall still call them — we conjure 
our brethren to pause. We do not ask them to patronize slavery — 
we do not wish tliem to ciiange their own institutions — we only 
ask them to treat us as the Apostles treated the slaveholders of their 
day, and leave to us the liberty which we accord to them, of con- 
ducting our affairs according to our own convictions of truth and 
duty. We ask it of them as Christians — as professed followers of 
Christ ; and if this reasonable demand is refused, upon them and 
not upon us must rest the perilous responsibility of the disasters 
that must inevitably follow. We are not alarmists, but slavery is 
implicated in every fibre of Southern society; it is with us a vital 
question, and it is because we knoio that interference with it cannot 
and will not be much longer endured, we raise our warning voice. 
We would save the country if we could. We would save the Con- 
stitution which our fathers framed, and we would have our children 
and our children's children, for countless generations, worship in the 
temple which our fathers reared. But this cannot be, unless our 
whole people shall be brought to feel that slavery is no ground of 
discord, and that in Christ Jesus there is neither bond nor free. 
Would to God that this blessed consummation could be reached ! 

In the mean time Christian masters at the South should address 
themselves with earnestness and vigor to the discharge of their 
solemn duties to their slaves. We would stir up their minds, not 
that they have been inattentive to the subject, but that they may 
take the more diligent heed. The most important and commanding 
of all their obligations is that which relates to religioui instruction. 
Food and raiment and shelter their interests will prompt them to 
provide ; but as the labour of the slave is expended for their benefit, 
they are bound, by the double consideration of justice and of mercy 
to care for his soul. We rejoice that so much has already been 
done in imparting the gospel to this class ; and we hope that the 
time is not far distant when every Christian master will feel that he 
is somewhat in the same sense responsible for the religious educa- 
tion of his slaves as for the religious education of his children. 
The Church, too, as an organized society, should give special atten- 



]6 REPORT ON SLAVERY. 

tion to the subject. There are many questions connected with 
it wiiich ought to be gravely and dehberately considered. We 
have no doubt that much effort has been uselessly expended, 
because injudiciously applied. Of one thing we are satisfied — their 
religious teachers should never be taken from among themselves. 
There is too great a proneness to superstition and extravagance 
among the most enlightened of them, to entrust them with the cure 
of souls. Their circumstances preclude them from the preparation 
and study which such a charge involves. There was wisdom in 
the statute of the primitive Church, which allowed none but a free- 
man to be a minister of the gospel. To say nothing of the fact that 
their time is under the direction of their masters, we would as soon 
think of making ministers and elders, and organizing Churches of 
children, as of according the same privilege to slaves. They would 
soon degrade piety into fanaticism, and the Church into bedlam. 
We rejoice that the Presbyteries of our own Synod have uniformly 
acted in conformity with this principle ; and although our success 
may, by consequence, be slow, it will eventually be sure. 



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